Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders
about the people, ideas and movement that have shaped rhetorical
history. I’m Mary Hedengren and the University of
Texas’ Humanities Media Project supports the podcast and

A few weeks ago I was at an excellent lecture by Collin Brooke
here at the university of Texas and he was talking about applying
the master tropes to different models of networks. Then I
thought--by Jove, the Master Tropes! What a brilliant idea for a
podcast! So with all deference to Dr. Brooke, let’s dive into these
four beauties of the world of tropes.

A trope, you may or not know, is a way of presenting thought in
language. A trope is different from what’s called a figure because
it doesn’t deal with arranging words, but rather arranging thought.
For example, a figure might be something like hyperbaton, which is
the the way that Yoda talks: “Patience you must have” just means
“you must have patience” there’s not change in the thought behind
the words, but the refiguring of the words creates interest, so
Yoda says things like “Miss them do not” instead of do not miss
them, but the ideas aren’t changed at all. That’s figures.

Occasionally, though, Yoda will use a trope. For example, once
he said ““In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more
knowledge lights our way.” This is, as it turns out, a metaphor:
knowledge doesn’t actually cast a glow, but it does make things
metaphorically clear. The words transform the ideas: light equals
knowledge. It’s not that Yoda changed the words around--all
considered this is pretty syntactically straight-forward for the
sage-green sage--but he’s presented the ideas in a different way.
This is a trope, not a figure.

It is, as a matter of fact, one of the four master tropes:
Metaphor, Synecdoche, Metonymy and Irony. It’s possible that
these terms aren’t familiar to you, or only in a vague, AP English
sort of way, so let me provide examples and definitions. Metaphor
is the trope that is most familiar to us: knowledge is light, the
Force is a river, many Storm troupers are a wall. So I’m going to
skip over that. Synecdoche is--aside from being difficult to
pronounce, using the part to represent the whole. I always think of
that movie Synecdoche New York, where the guy builds a replica of
New York for a movie. The standard examples include things like
“earning your bread and butter” when you’re hopefully earning much
more than that or “putting boots on the ground” when the military
often needs soldiers, too, to fill those boots. I used to joke with
my Mormon comedy group since everyone prays to “bless the hands
that prepared this food,” if there was a terrible accident in
the kitchen and everyone died, at least the hands would be
preserved. So you get the idea. Metonymy can sometimes be a little
more confusing, because it, like Synecdoche, involves using a word
associated with the idea to stand in for the idea itself. We say
things like “the White House has issued a statement” when the
building itself has done no such thing, or “Hollywood is corrupt”
to represent the movie business generally. Some people will say
that synecdoche is just a specific kind of metonymy, like how
simile is a specific kind of metaphor. Finally, irony may seem like
a simple, straightforward trope, but it can be notoriously complex,
as Wayne Booth describes in greater detail in The Rhetoric of
Irony. How we we know when someone is being ironic? How much
is irony dependent on understanding cultural cues? Why do we say
the opposite of what we mean as a way to say what we want? Tricky
stuff all around.

The four master tropes are probably most familiar to
rhetoricians as the essay found way in the back of Kenneth Burke’s
Grammar of Methods, way way back as an appendix. There, Burke
equates these over-arching tropes with different epistemic
perspectives: metaphor correlates with perspective,
metonymy with reduction, synecdoche with
representation, and irony with dialectic.
The way that we construct thought depends on how we use these four
master tropes.

Remember when we talked about the Metaphors we live by? Well,
Burke says that we don’t just live by metaphors individually, but
also by the idea of metaphor, or by reduction, representation or
dialectic. The tropes, instead of just being a way to make your
writing more flowery, can be a critical part of invention, and how
you see the world more generally. Are you inclined to think
inductively, looking at a couple of examples of Sith lords and
there after making generalizations about the group as a whole and
their capacity to run a competent daycare? It’s possible to think
in terms of irony, transpositioning one view of truth with an
anti-thetical perspective: can Anikin be both on the dark side and
not on the dark side? Can you both do and do not if you only try?
These master tropes are not just ways of expressing ideas about the
world, but coming to make ideas as well.

I’m a huge fan of Burke, but I’m afraid that I can’t give him
credit for coming up with the idea of four master tropes that
encompass other ways of figuring ideas. I’m sorry to say that that
distinction goes to--ew--Petrus Ramus. Yes, Ramus, the
mustache-twirling villain of rhetoric himself. Back when we did our
series on the villains of rhetoric, Ramus was public enemy number
one, removing invention from rhetoric and diminishing the whole
affair to a series of branching “yes and no” questions and needless
ornamentation. And yet it was Ramus, in his eagerness to classify
everything into categories and subcategories who coined the idea of
the master tropes back in 1549. Fortunately the idea was taken up
by a more palatable figure of rhetorical history, Giambattista
Vico, who in the 18th century, identified the master tropes as
basic tropes, or fundamental tropes, being those to which all
others are reducible.

Since Burke, though, others have taken up the idea that these
tropes of arranging ideas might become ways to think about the
world in general. Hayden White, for instance, saw the master tropes
as representing something about literature.

Trope

Genre

('mode of emplotment')

Worldview

('mode of argument')

Ideology

('mode of ideological implication')

Metaphor

romance

formism

anarchism

Metonymy

comedy

organicism

conservatism

Synecdoche

tragedy

mechanism

radicalism

Irony

satire

contextualism

liberalism

He constructed a table where each trope has its own genre,
worldview and ideology. Metaphor, for instance, was about
romance--or we might say fantasy--and was associated with formism
and an ideology of anarchism because anything might apply as a
metaphor. Metonymy was associated with comedy, organicism and
conservatism--presumably because if you assume that “the White
House” speaks for the country, you’re putting a lot of stock in the
traditional power that dominates. Conversely, synecdoche was
associated with tragedy, mechanism and radicalism. Irony, naturally
enough, was the trope of satire and its world view of contextualism
and liberalism. Once White had come up with this tidy table, he
because to think about the tropes not just statically, but how they
might evolve temporally, both in terms of an individual child’s
development and in a civilization.

Metaphor was the earliest stage, corresponding to infants up to
two years old and aligned with Foucault’s conceptualization of the
Renaissance. Then metaphor gives way to metonymy, the domain of
children from 2-7, which White lines up with the Classical period
and the Enlightenment--very conservative and fond of
straight-forward comedy. Next comes synecdoche of tweens and the
modernist period--radically breaking from the past and finally, in
crowning achievement, irony, the stage of teenagers and adults,
corresponding to the post-modernist era, with its love of
counterintuitive and contradictory thought.

Hayden White's Sequence of Tropes

Piagetian stages of cognitive development

White's alignment of Foucault's historical
epochs

Metaphor

sensorimotor stage (birth to about 2 years)

Renaissance period (sixteenth century)

Metonymy

pre-operational stage (2 to 6/7 years)

Classical period (seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries)

Synecdoche

concrete operations stage (6/7 to 11/12 years)

Modern period (late eighteenth to early twentieth
century)

Irony

formal operations stage (11/12 to adult)

Postmodern period

Others have highlighted the philosophical or historiographical
possibilities of the mastertropes, including Jakobson and Foucault
himself. Which brings me back to this fascinating, exploratory
lecture by Collin Brooke.

Brooke suggested another correlation for the master tropes: not
ways of thinking or periods of time, but networks of connection.
Networks are a big stinking deal for digital humanists and new
media rhetoricians like Brooke, and some of the different types of
networks, brooke proposes, may correlate to the master tropes:
hierarchies, for instance, are like metaphors, which correspond
across groups--the padowan learner doesn’t really tell us much
about the Jedi master who trains her, but you expect the role of
that padowan learner to be similar to the role of another padowan
who studies under another master. Synecdoche, though, can be seen
in truly random networks. A network of 200 that is truly random, is
representative of a network of 2000, or of 2 million. Some networks
are neither analogous like metaphor or random like synecdoche. In
situations that produce what’s been called the long tail--citations
for example, some groups or people are more popular because they
are more popular. the more people who fear Jabba the hut--peons,
bounty hunters-- the more he is feared. It creates a snowball
effect that is similar to metonymy. Brooke’s ideas are inchoate and
he admits that he’s not sure what network might correlate to
irony--it’s all a work in progress, afterall, but it goes to show
that the organization appeal of the master tropes continues. The
idea of tropes that rule all the other tropes and say something
meaningful about the ways in which we construct and understand the
world around us is a timeless appeal that goes all the way back to
Vico--er, let’s just say Vico, okay. Until next week--miss us
you must not because patience you must have.

About the Podcast

A podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movements that have defined the history of rhetoric.